Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia Steven J

Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia Steven J. Jackson Alex Pompe Gabriel Krieshok Department of Information Science School of Information School of Information Cornell University University of Michigan University of Michigan [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT novelty, growth, and progress as our starting point. This paper explores the nature and centrality of This perspective runs somewhat counter to the way we maintenance and repair (‘M&R’) work in the extension and usually approach questions of design and development, in sustainability of ICT infrastructure in the global South. both CSCW and the ICT and development (ICTD) fields. Drawing from pragmatist traditions in CSCW and the social Most accounts of ICT and development have emphasized sciences at large, we develop a concept of ‘repair worlds’ encounters between organizations, communities and intended to map the varieties and effects of such technologies at the front end, emphasizing pathways, maintenance and repair activities. Empirically, our analysis patterns, and problems that accompany the introduction of builds on ethnographic fieldwork into local practices of (new) technological forms to (new) geographic and cultural maintenance and repair that have accompanied and communities. ICT-related development statistics and supported the extension of mobile phone and computing studies have long reflected this bent. We keep track of infrastructure in the Kavango region of northeastern figures like ICT penetration, adoption, and diffusion, but Namibia. rarely breakdown or abandonment. We capture statistics on cell phones purchased, but rarely cell phones discarded. We Author Keywords study how communities embrace or adapt to new Maintenance, repair, infrastructure, theory, ethnography, technologies, but less often how they organize to sustain, development, ICTD. manage, repurpose, or simply live with what they have. (As ACM Classification Keywords a thought experiment, consider how our statistical and H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): design universes might shift if we imagined a Miscellaneous. fundamentally contracting technological world, and what we measured was technological breakdown, withdrawal and General Terms decline – a recessionary rather than a progressive, Management, Theory. informatics?). That we don’t (usually) live in such a world may have less 1. INTRODUCTION to do with any inner logic of economic or technological This paper explores the centrality of maintenance and repair advance than with the remarkable and diverse human work in the ongoing project of building robust, appropriate, capacity for repair: the ability to make broken and breaking and sustainable ICT systems in countries of the global south systems work, and to sustain what we have for at least a – a project to which CSCW has much to contribute. It also little while longer. This sensibility has long animated an argues that CSCW has much to (re)learn in this process: important branch of American social thought, from John about the nature and variability of socio-technical activity Dewey’s insistence on disruption as site and instigation to (especially as played out over cultural and infrastructural thought [1], to the breaching experiments of difference); the work required to sustain and adapt systems ethnomethodologists like Garfinkel [2], to later Chicago over time (including beyond initial moments of design and School sociologists’ concerns with infrastructure, adoption); and the distinctively different worlds of design articulation, and invisible work [3-5]. Social order, such and practice that appear to us when we take erosion, work insists, is not the natural or inevitable outcome of breakdown, and decay (‘broken world thinking’) rather than ‘structure,’ but rather a remarkable and often fragile accomplishment. Social things, the pragmatists remind us, take work to maintain. And so, too, does technology. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are In the paper that follows, we explore maintenance and not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies repair as distinctive sites and categories of CSCW work, bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, with particular focus on ICT and development efforts in the or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior global South. Drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork specific permission and/or a fee. CSCW’12, February 11–15, 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA. conducted during summer 2010 in the Kavango region of Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-0267-8/11/05....$10.00. Northeastern Namibia, we offer the beginnings of a thick 1 description of the distinctive repair worlds that characterize, ‘world,’ whose function and variety is central to the nature shape, and sustain the emerging ICT ecologies of the and overall success of ICT development in the region. region. In the process, we open up new sites and themes for To this end, we offer ethnographic data drawn from CSCW scholarship – many of which take us back to fieldwork conducted by two members of the project team challenges and problems foundational to the field. between May and July 2010 around ICT and educational 2. LITERATURE AND METHODS development efforts in the Kavango region of northeastern CSCW has a rich albeit uneven history of attention to Namibia. This included 34 semi-structured interviews with maintenance and repair concerns. In its design guise, such regional technology providers, managers, technicians, and themes are often implicated in CSCW work attending to users, conducted in a combination of English and ‘downstream’ tensions in the relationship between design Rukwangali (the leading regional language) and focusing and use, leading to ethnographic descriptions and/or on patterns, practices, tensions, and barriers to effective and programmatic calls for tailoring, end user involvement, and sustainable ICT adoption; and field observations at 14 more iterative or ecological approaches to the design different rural and urban sites in which primarily problematic [6-8]. A related body of work has explored educational technologies (usually computer labs) were instances of breakdown and non-adoption confronting the being deployed. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 55 deployment of CSCW artifacts and systems, including years old, were evenly split between men and women, and through contradictions embedded in the relationship were recruited according to their involvement as technology between technical and organizational form [9-11]. users, providers, or promoters in the region. Interviews and fieldnotes were translated (where necessary), transcribed, Our own approach, building from pragmatist traditions, is and coded by all three members of the project team to treat such instances of breakdown and failure as fully according to the principles of grounded theory analysis [18- ordinary, and ask instead (with genuine curiosity and 19]; early rounds of coding thus came to guide subsequent wonder) how it is that any sociotechnical arrangement can data collection efforts, including more focused attention be made to work and persist through time. Here we connect (per grounded theory principles of theoretical sampling) to to a third strain of CSCW work emphasizing the diverse the dynamics of maintenance and repair that emerged as an and subtle forms of work that go into the ongoing operation early and central theme of the fieldwork. This initial of artifacts and systems as ‘infrastructure’ (vis-à-vis given fieldwork has since been supplemented through ongoing forms of collective activity and variously situated social interactions with a team of local partners, who continue to groups). Star and Strauss have analyzed forms of conduct occasional interviews and supply materials relevant articulation work, much of it invisible, supporting the to the themes of the study. More broadly, our findings draw introduction and maintenance of collectively shared on one of the author’s prior experience as an IT and artifacts and systems [3]. In their 1994 CSCW study of the education volunteer in the Kavango region between WORM community system, Star and Ruhleder advance an November 2006 and January 2009. influential definition of infrastructure, emphasizing the embeddedness of infrastructure (in social arrangements and 3. REPAIR WORLDS technical form); its tendency to remain invisible (except at For Strauss and fellow travelers in Chicago School moments of breakdown); its connection to membership in sociology traditions, social worlds display a number of specific communities of practice; its relationship to an common properties. In each world, at least one primary installed base (from which it inherits both strengths and activity (along with related clusters of activity) is strikingly limits); and its tendency to change in local and modular evident: e.g., climbing mountains, researching, and increments – in part through the resistances and collecting. There are sites where activities occur, breakdowns it occasions and encounters [4]. Subsequent implicating place, landscape, and a shared built CSCW scholarship has built on this definition, further environment. Technology (understood broadly as inherited developing the active [12-13], relational [14], agonistic, or innovative modes of carrying out the social world’s [15-16] and

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